Over on The Financial Times blog, John Gapper provides some details and analysis of Anil Kumar’s guilty plea in the Galleon insider-trading scandal. For those who have not been following the situation closely, Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey Director, “put his own reputation — and that of the firm — at risk for $2.6m … which is said to have been paid to him in return for providing inside information on companies he gleaned through his work at McKinsey,” according to Gapper. There are really two procurement ironies and lessons we can draw from this. For one, Kumar, whom I previously referred to as the “knowledge-process outsourcing godfather,” was the original thought leader who introduced the idea of companies sharing confidential information with offshore partners in the spirit of both savings and efficiency (obviously, trust never quite factored into that notion).

Perhaps the more important lesson for procurement in all of this is that we should step back and think about the level of comfort we feel with sharing information with our services suppliers…

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Obsessed with how companies manage, spend and save money, Jason writes about procurement, trade and supply chain issues @ Spend Matters. He has significant first hand experience developing and marketing technology and services products, has advised numerous companies on sourcing and related techniques as well as M&A pursuits. In previous lives before tech, he was a management consultant and merchant banking analyst.